Several models of service are emerging in academic and research libraries for the collection and management of scientific data – an important segment of an institution’s total scholarly production. As libraries work to develop services to support the management of locally-generated data, they will require new kinds of expertise for providing appraisal, management, and access to data for long term use. Data curation is the active and on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education; curation activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain quality, add value, and provide for re-use over time. However, recent reports on e-research, cyberinfrastructure, and the stewardship of digital assets acknowledge a significant deficit in the workforce that will be required to manage these increasing data stores. To address this growing need, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has initiated a new concentration within our ALA-accredited Master of Science degree. The Data Curation Education Program (DCEP) offers a focus on data collection and management, knowledge representation, digital preservation and archiving, data standards, and policy. In this poster we will introduce key elements of our Data Curation Education Program and some implications for preparing librarians and information specialists to carry out data curation activities in libraries. Based on the work of our Advisory Committee, we will also present emergent best practices for preparing LIS students to work on digital data curation problems in academic and research libraries.
References
Association of Research Libraries (2006). To Stand the Test of Time: Long-term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering. A Report to the National Science Foundation from the ARL Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe. Washington, DC: ARL. Available at http://www.arl.org/info/events/digdatarpt.pdf. Accessed: January 17, 2007.
National Science Board. (2005). NSB-05-40, Long-lived digital data collections enabling research and education in the 21st century. Available at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsb0540/. Accessed: January 17, 2007.